Border Capitalism, Disrupted

Border Capitalism, Disrupted presents an insightful ethnography of migrant labor regulation at the Mae Sot Special Border Economic Zone on the Myanmar border in northwest Thailand. By bringing a new deployment of workerist and autonomist theory to bear on his fieldwork, Stephen Campbell highlights the ways in which workers’ struggles have catalyzed transformations in labor regulation at the frontiers of capital in the global south.

Looking outwards from Mae Sot, Campbell engages extant scholarship on flexibilization and precarious labor, which, typically, is based on the development experiences of the global north. Campbell emphasizes the everyday practices of migrants, the police, employers, NGOs, and private passport brokers to understand the "politics of precarity" and the new forms of worker organization and resistance that are emerging in Asian industrial zones.

Focusing, in particular, on the uses and effects of borders as technologies of rule, Campbell argues that geographies of labor regulation can be read as the contested and fragile outcomes of prior and ongoing working-class struggles. Border Capitalism, Disrupted concludes that with the weakened influence of formal unions, understanding the role of these alternative forms of working-class organizations in labor-capital relations becomes critical.

With a broad data set gleaned from almost two years of fieldwork, Border Capitalism, Disrupted will appeal directly to those in anthropology, labor studies, political economy, and geography, as well as Southeast Asian studies.

"Astute.... Stephen Campbell’s Border Capitalism, Disrupted insightfully describes Mae Sot as a space where a novel regulative 'bordering' process has produced a site uniquely ordered for global capitalism. His carefully-reasoned argument is introduced in the title of the book: that the production of two borders has enabled now 'legal' appropriation and exploitation of a fixed migrant population."

- Tea Circle

Border Capitalism, Disrupted

"An excellent addition to the expanding literature that analyses the situation of migrant workers in Mae Sot....and should be of great interest to people working on labour relations, labour migration, Southeast Asian studies, anthropology and political science."

- Journal of Contemporary Asia

Border Capitalism, Disrupted

"Border Capitalism, Disrupted is rich ethnographically, intelligent theoretically, deals with an important topic, and is well written. Stephen Campbell's work will be of interest to scholars of borderlands, migration, police, and corruption, NGOs, anthropology of work, and global assembly industries."

- Josiah Heyman, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Interamerican and Border Studies at the University of Texas, El Paso